


Cursed!  Maybe!!!

by DesertScribe



Category: Garth Marenghi's Darkplace
Genre: Broken Glass Where Broken Glass Has No Business Being!, Canon-Typical Darkplace-ness And Everything That Entails, Mummies!, Other Stuff!, Pastiche
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 18:51:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20912429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: It's just an ordinary day at Darkplace Hospital aside from a small matter of a mummy's curse, but those things are a dime a dozen, so there's no need to worry.Or is there?*lightning crashes and the hospital lights flicker*





	Cursed!  Maybe!!!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).

"I'm Garth Marenghi, author, dreamweaver, visionary, plus actor. You're about to enter the world of my imagination. You are entering my darkplace."

* * *

**Episode 11**  
**Cursed! Maybe!!**

The episode opens with the usual exterior wide shot of Darkplace Hospital. As always, it looks damn foreboding and spooky, because that's just the nature of the place and always has been, even before a certain extremely handsome young doctor helped open the Gates of Hell inside of it. Really, the nearby dead trees and complete lack of any surrounding buildings is just gilding the lily in terms of ambiance, because the building could speak for itself just fine. But sometimes lilies need to be gilded, and that's exactly what Darkplace Hospital is, a giant looming foreboding and spooky grey cement gilded lily which looks nothing like a cheap cardboard model. Enjoy it if you dare, but don't breathe too deeply as you do, because this lily's pollen is even more evil than ordinary pollen, which is already pretty damn evil. Remember, it's hard to scream in terror when your sinuses are all blocked up by allergies.

* * *

**Interior: Darkplace Hospital reception area**

Liz Asher wanders into Darkplace Hospital to begin her shift, but she looks even more dazed than usual. She looks dazed because she is dazed. Hearing constant screaming all night long will do that to a person, doesn't matter whose screaming it is. Well, it matters a little bit, because if it's a person's own screaming, then the straits are especially dire. Anything that causes sleep deprivation will do that to a person, but in this case it was constant screaming.

"Wow, Liz, you look rough," Dr. Lucien Sanchez says by way of a greeting from where he lounges against the reception desk. He smiles at her to show that even a rough looking Liz Asher is a very appealing sight, but Liz is unmoved by either the words or the expression, because she, along with everyone else in Darkplace Hospital, knows that Dr. Lucien Sanchez is no longer the ladies' man he once was, thanks to catching a virulent case of sexually transmitted space brassica and needing to have his penis surgically removed after it turned into broccoli. Also because of the whole thing with the screaming.

"I hear screaming," Liz says. "And I've been hearing it all night long."

"Don't we all, Liz," Sanchez says, and it isn't a question. "Don't we all." That isn't a question either. He pulls a flask out of the pocket of his white doctor's coat, undoes the cap, and takes a swig from it. Which is to say that he takes a swig from the flask, not from the cap, because the tiny caps they put on those flasks are never big enough to hold any quantity of alcohol to be worth the trouble unless you're a mouse, and Lucien Sanchez may technically be more woman than man due to no longer having a penis, but he is no mouse.

Darkplace Hospital doesn't have any mice on the payroll as doctors. Not anymore. Not since that team of surgeon-mice were told to perform a routine appendectomy and instead ate his liver. They claimed he was an alkie and had such bad cirrhosis that they'd mistaken his liver for cheese, but of course they'd say that, wouldn't they? You can't trust mice, not even mice who've made it through medical school and surgical residency with top marks.

"Lots of people and things scream all the time," Dr. Rick Dagless M.D. adds as he walks up to his fellow medical professionals. He wasn't around to hear the beginning of their conversation, but Dr. Rick Dagless M.D. is the kind of insightful guy who is really good at reading a room and instantly picking up on all the pertinent details. It's one of his many gifts in addition to being incredibly good looking and a brilliant surgeon. "The plumbing and boilers in this old place scream all the time, Liz. That's just what plumbing and boilers do when they're doing their jobs. The men the hospital pays to work on the plumbing and boilers scream all the time. That's just what people do when pipes burst and spray them with scalding water and steam. I'm screaming silently inside the privacy of my own mind because everyone I love dies in horribly gruesome and traumatic for me ways, like my half grasshopper son who accidentally jumped into spinning helicopter blades while I was watching."

"Yes," Liz says, "I can hear your inner screams with my psychic powers."

Rick scowls at Liz good-naturedly. "Stay out of my brain. I said it's private."

"Sorry, Rick." Liz averts her eyes in humble shame. "You know how difficult it is for a mere woman to control herself, especially around you. I think I'm going to need another lobotomy soon, before I get too powerful again."

"I'll be happy to cut out a chunk of your brain for your own good whenever you need, little missy," Rick says, chucking her under the chin in a paternal manner.

"Thanks, Rick!"

"But like I was saying," Rick continues, "screaming is just part of the human condition."

Just then, Jim the ginger porter with ridiculous sideburns rushes into the reception area through the exterior doors. He is pushing a gurney with a screaming and writhing man who is covered in blood. Being covered is to be expected from anyone with that many glass shards visibly sticking out of his bum as this man has. However, it's still a shocking sight. Blood is always a shocking sight, even to trained doctors who go looking for it as part of their jobs. Glass shards sticking out of someone's bum are also always a shocking sight. Not even doctors go looking for a sight like that. Yet here that very sight is before the eyes of two doctors and a lady doctor, having been brought to them like a Christmas goose with all the fixings. And one of those fixings is blood!

* * *

_The opening credits roll. The dramatic scenes of explosions and heroism with their backing of cutting edge synth music are as glorious as ever._

* * *

**Interior: Darkplace Hospital reception area, picking up exactly where things left off before the opening credit sequence**

"Aaaahhh!" screams the man on the gurney.

Everyone stares at the man with professional curiosity as Jim skids the gurney to a halt in front of the group.

"Like I said," Rick says, taking another sip of his coffee, "it's part of the human condition."

"It's so true," Liz whispers breathily in wonder.

"Indeed," agrees Dr. Sanchez.

"So," Rich says, throwing away his half finished coffee over his shoulder with the casual confidence of a man who does not need to see his target to have perfect aim. A closeup shot shows the cup dropping perfectly into the bin beside the desk, so even if you think the wide shot a split second earlier showed the cup sailing off somewhere behind the desk, you're wrong. But forget about how perfect Dr. Rick Dagless M.D.'s aim is, because he is talking to Jim the ginger porter now. "What happened to this poor fellow here, Jim?"

"Aaargh! Oh, the agony! It hurts!" screams the man with glass in him bum.

"It didn't happen here, Rick," Jim says, "not at Darkplace Hospital which is a place of healing and life (and occasional horrible death, but we're not supposed to talk about that part). It happened at the Romford Museum of Natural and Unnatural History, where they keep all those creepy and probably evil dead things and everyone's allowed to talk about how the place is probably home to dark magics."

"So then what happened to this poor fellow at the museum?"

"Aaahhhh! I was giving the floor in front of the mummy display a quick mop up before the museum opened for the day!" screams the man. "While I was mopping, I noticed one of the display cases was broken and its mummy was missing! I was so surprised that I slipped in mop water and fell on the broken glass lying on the floor and the glass got stuck in me bum! Aaarraaagh!!!"

"I didn't know the local museum had a mummy display," Liz says.

"It's so famous that it spent the last five years touring the world to let everyone else see that Romford's collection of old dead people is so much better than theirs," Rick tells her, because he always has time to help a colleague learn something new, except for the rare occasions when he doesn't, which this is not one of. "It just got back into town and reopened this week. If you can keep from letting any patients die before Friday, I'll take you to see it as a reward."

"I'd like that, Rick. I promise I won't let you down," Liz says happily, because she's the kind of girl who always looking on the bright side of life when she's not seething with PMT or telekinetic psychic tantrums.

"But what do we do about this poor sod in the meantime?" Sanchez asks.

"Liz can take him," Rick says magnanimously.

"Really?" asks Sanchez.

"Really?" asks Liz.

"Really," says Rick. He takes a calm, slow sip of his coffee while staring them both in the eye at once to emphasize how sure of his answer he is.

"I'm on it, Rick!" Liz says with a jaunty salute. Then she turns to Jim. "Jim," she says to the ginger porter in question or who would be in question if anyone were asking questions right now, "take this man to the operating room we use for getting glass out of people's bums!"

"Already on it, Dr. Liz," Jim says even though he doesn't actually get on it until a few seconds until after she tells him to. He means well but sometimes he just can't help telling little white lies to try to make himself look better.

* * *

**Dean Learner**  
**Publisher**

"The script originally called for the museum employee to appear in several other scenes," Dean says as he stares off somewhere beyond the camera operator's left shoulder and puffs on his cigar. "Those plans changed when the actor had a slight accident while getting off of the gurney. Ironically, he slipped and fell, just like his character was supposed to have done. It was funny, and we all laughed. We were so busy laughing that it took us a while to notice that the pieces of glass we had glued to him to make it look like they were stuck in his bottom went into his bottom and surrounding areas for real. One of them hit his femoral artery and the poor chap bled out in seconds. Not even people who work with pieces of broken glass all the time could have predicted that, so how could it be called negligence when I didn't predict it?" He scowls at the camera. "It shouldn't have been called negligence, not in a fair world."

He pauses to puff on his cigar some more and then continues, "Anyway, we were on a tight schedule and didn't have time to re-cast the part. Garth bitched and moaned like you would not believe about doing those rewrites, so we mostly just cut out all the scenes that were supposed to take place in the museum. Cutting the scenes before we filmed them let us come in under budget for the episode. So while some people insist on calling the incident a tragedy, _I_ call it a net positive tragedy."

* * *

**back to the show…**

"Broken glass on the floor and a missing mummy, huh?" Shachez says as he and Rick admire the view of Liz departing down the hall. "Sounds like the museum had a break-in. I'm surprised there wasn't anything about it in the morning paper."

"Sure, it _sounds_ like the museum had a break-in, Sanch," Rick says with a frown. "But it also sounds like it could have been a break-_out_ instead."

A flash of lightning and roll of thunder punctuate Rick's statement as he and Sanchez frown at each other.

"Five quid says it was a break-in," Sanchez says after several minutes of dramatic staring.

"Ten quid says it was a break-out and we're going to have to fight a mummy before the end of the day," Rick counters.

"You're on," Sanchez says.

The two shake hands as the show cuts to a commercial break.

* * *

**Interior: the hallway outside of the Getting Glass Out Of People's Bums Operating Room.**

"Well it took five hours of picking out pieces of glass, a long lunch break to re-gather my wits, and then five hours of careful stitching, but that museum janitor is going to make a full recovery with only a large collection of disfiguring scars on his bottom to show for it," Liz announces as she steps out of the operating room to join Rick and Sanchez, who are waiting for her in the hall. Her arms and clothes are covered in blood, but there's nothing unusual about that, and she walks tall and confident and proud of herself. "Also," she adds, "having finally seen a man's naked bum for the first time I can announce that I have truly become a woman."

The camera cuts to a static shot of the operating room's door with nothing visible through its suddenly dark windows as Liz's voice continues in a slightly rushed manner, "The poor man was so embarrassed that I had to let him sneak out the rear entrance to save his dignity." Then the camera switches back to showing the three doctors standing around in the hallway.

"I'm happy for you, Liz," Rick says, beginning sullenly but growing more savage in his anger as he goes along, "but while you were spending ten hours on what should have been a quickie, all the other patients who you were supposed see in that time dropped dead, even the woman who wanted to know if the mustache someone had drawn on her with a biro while she was asleep was a cancerous mole. I'd be tempted to say it was the mummy's curse that got her, but the truth is that it was the boredom of waiting for you, Liz. Boredom! Just like Sanch and I were so bored that we went to the museum to investigate the break-out without you!" The camera quick-cuts to:

* * *

**Flashback:**

The camera shows a static shot of the exterior of the Romford Museum of Natural and Unnatural History. It is an impressive marble façade with stone columns which absolutely do not look like they were made from paper towel tubes.

Rick, in voiceover, says, "I guess it really was a break-in and not a break-out. Here's your ten quid, Sanch."

Sanchez, also in voiceover, answers, "Thanks, Dag! A man who honors his bets is the best kind of man there is. Too bad about the missing mummy being the naked one with his willy sticking out for everyone to see."

"Son of a bitch," Rick's voice can be heard to exclaim, "I'd heard that was the best one, and now I'll never get to see it. Antiquities theft really is the cancer that is killing modern culture."

"You took the words right out of my mouth, Dag."

* * *

**Todd Rivers**  
**Actor**

"I found the 'script'," he makes quotation marks with his fingers, "for this episode under my bed. There was supposed to have been a whole plot about how the broken glass was because Dr. Sanchez had broken into the museum to steal a mummy's penis to replace the one that got amputated," Todd tells the camera. "Once he attached it to himself, he had sex with lots of women, and all of them died. People kept stumbling over their shriveled corpses in storage cupboards and similar places. Dagless led an investigation into a mummy's curse until Sanchez eventually admitted to what he had done. With that piece of the puzzle, Dagless figured out the deaths weren't due to a curse at all but, rather, because the dry mummy penis sucked out all the women's fluids while it was re-hydrating and would stop killing people during sex once it stopped being man-beef-jerky." He turns contemplative as he continues, "There are plenty of works which delve into the primal fear of emasculation. It would have been a rare work indeed to try to make you fear _re_masculation, so I can't for the life of me remember why that plot, which would have been the whole second half of the episode, got dropped and the missing screentime filled in with more slow motion shots." Todd rubs his chin thoughtfully and muses, "It was probably something about Garth realizing his character was sleeping with far fewer women than mine was and he didn't want me getting any further ahead…."

* * *

**Back in the hallway:**

"Just like Sanch and I were so bored that we went to the museum to investigate the break-out without you!" Rick continues saying.

"I've failed you again, Rick," Liz cries. "I don't deserve a trip to the museum. Not with you! Not with anyone!" She runs off sobbing.

Rick and Sanchez watch her go. For a long moment, neither man says anything. Then Sanchez dares to break the poignant silence.

"Maybe the real mummy's curse is how you keep letting your expectations get too high, Dag," Sanchez says in a rare moment of wisdom.

"Maybe it is, Sanch, maybe it is," Rick sighs.

"Maybe you need to just go ahead and go see that exhibit on your own instead of waiting to find someone worthy to go with you, or you'll never see it at all."

"And maybe you don't have a soul," Rick snaps and stalks off in the opposite direction from where Liz went. It's in the opposite direction from where he wants to go, but some things are more important than taking the most expedient path between two points in a building.

Sanchez silently watches his friend walk away from him until he disappears around a bend in the hall with a dramatic swirl of the tails of his doctor's coat. Then, into the empty hallway, Sanchez says, "I'd go with you to the museum, Rick, even though the whole place is damn creepy and probably had more evil all over it than the Darkplace canteen. You never ask, though, Rick. You never ask." The camera zooms in to show a single manly tear running down someone's cheek. No one else is around, so it must belong to Sanchez.

The only answer Sanchez gets is more silence. Still, at least they've all gotten through another shift at Darkplace Hospital without any staff fatalities, and that has to count for something.

Yes, that definitely counts for something.

Or does it?

* * *

**Exterior: Darkplace Hospital rooftop**

Rick stands alone on the hospital roof, staring off into the distance in the general direction of the fading orange glow of what is sure to be a glorious sunset over Romford, if only the camera were to turn in that direction to share it with the audience. Instead, the camera stays focused on Rick's dramatically illuminated face as he puffs on his cigarette somehow both cynically and contemplative at the same time without being cynically contemplative or contemplatively cynical. It's the kind of nuance which only a very complicated man can maintain, and Dr. Rick Dagless M.D. is as complicated as a man can get. It's both part of his charm and his lifelong curse.

"It's nice to have a normal, quiet day for once, but I know it won't last," Rick whispers to the wind itself. Or maybe he's only pretending to talk to the wind and in reality is talking to Darkplace Hospital herself, because god knows the grotty old bitch of a medical edifice loves to eavesdrop. "It never lasts and probably never will. This is just the calm before the storm, and I'm going to be ready for whatever's coming next. I have to be." He clenches his hands into fists. "I have to be," he says again. "I have to be," he repeats one more time, for good measure. He considers saying it once more, just to make sure the universe understands that he really means, but he decides that would be excessive.

The wind ruffles Rick's hair as if in agreement with his newfound resolve. Or maybe the wind just likes touching and petting him because he's so handsome that even the air itself can't resist him. Either way, Rick appreciates the attention even if he is too stoic to let that appreciation show outwardly.

He takes a final drag from his cigarette, flicks the spent butt away into the nothingness beyond the edge of the roof, then turns and heads back inside where if a new disaster is not already awaiting his attention, then one will be soon.

* * *

_The end credits roll._

"Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is a Garth Marenghi production in association with Dean Learner."


End file.
